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Saturday, September 30, 2017

Bone to Pick by TA Moore

Cloister Witte is a man with a dark past and a cute dog.
He’s happy to talk about the dog all day, but after growing up in the shadow of
a missing brother, a deadbeat dad, and a criminal stepfather, he’d rather leave
the past back in Montana. These days he’s a K-9 officer in the San Diego County
Sheriff’s Department and pays a tithe to his ghosts by doing what no one was
able to do for his brother—find the missing and bring them home.

He’s good at solving difficult mysteries. The dog is even better.

This time the missing person is a ten-year-old boy who walked into the woods in
the middle of the night and didn’t come back. With the antagonistic help of
distractingly handsome FBI agent Javi Merlo, it quickly becomes clear that Drew
Hartley didn’t run away. He was taken, and the evidence implies he’s not the
kidnapper’s first victim. As the search intensifies, old grudges and tragedies
are pulled into the light of day. But with each clue they uncover, it looks less
and less likely that Drew will be found alive.

So, this is a great mystery. It was fast paced, had a lot of developed ideas,
and then there was a distinct feeling of the who did it? I think that had this
been only a murder/kidnapping mystery that it would have been an overall home
run.

The characters were hard for me to relate to – they were supposed to be written
as strong men, however, both were whiny or kind of weak in their own way.

Cloister Witte is the K-9 officer who is the best within the closest radius to
several small towns. He knows that he's good and his dog, Bourneville (Bon), is
amazing. I loved the relationship and trust that they had. Where Witte falls
short for me is when Javi is around. Witte becomes this character that I didn't
really recognize as the best K-9 officer around. Rather, he becomes this shy,
bumbling, no self-confidence guy who lets Javi insult and walk all over him.

Javi is just a bully through and through. It's like he was raised to be mean
and takes pride in his ability to shake off his own guilt at treating others
like they are mud on his shoe. He was not a great detective/FBI agent; he was
smart enough to listen to Witte, but that was about it.

The two of them together was hard to read because I had such a disliking to
Javi and thought that Witte could do so much better.

Overall, the mystery is super solid. I liked where it went, the teasing, and
the result. The romance was not very successful and I think that I needed more
from that aspect for it to become more successful.

Sarah – ☆☆☆☆☆
This is a darker and grittier murder mystery than the blurb suggests and I
really loved it. More True Detective
than Rizzoli and Isles, K-9 handler
Cloister Witte and FBI agent Javi Merlo are an unlikely crime solving team and
their investigation into a kidnapping digs deep into a small town’s ugly and
long held secrets.

Cloister and Javi are not terribly likeable antiheroes. Merlo is judgmental and
abrasive. Witte’s dog is more engaging than he is. Witte plays to his dumb
redneck stereotype and Merlo is a little bit emotionally constipated. Oddly, I
loved these two. They are both interesting, carefully developed, and
refreshingly human.

There are some crazy hot sex scenes in the book, but I wouldn’t say there’s really
any romance. This is primarily a kidnapping/murder mystery. The plot is layered
and complex and I followed it without guessing the whole outcome. I enjoyed the
K-9 aspect of the story (Bourneville might be the only likeable character).
This is an exciting, well-crafted story and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

TA MOORE genuinely believed that she was a Cabbage Patch Kid when she was a
small child. This was the start of a lifelong attachment to the weird and
fantastic. These days she lives in a market town on the Northern Irish coast
and her friends have a rule that she can only send them three weird and
disturbing links a month (although she still holds that a DIY penis bifurcation
guide is interesting, not disturbing). She believes that adding ‘in space!’ to
anything makes it at least 40% cooler, will try to pet pretty much any animal
she meets (this includes snakes, excludes bugs), and once lied to her friend
that she had climbed all the way up to Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, when
actually she’d only gotten to the beach, realized it was really high, and
chickened out.

She aspires to being a cynical misanthrope, but is unfortunately held back by a
sunny disposition and an inability to be mean to strangers. If TA Moore is mean
to you, that means you’re friends now.

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